Fun With our Meebo Widget and the Library Catalog

Update: I’m getting some questions on how we did this, so… We have a Horizon system – look for the searchinput.xsl page in your XSL folder. Then find the appropriate chunk of code where the “nothing found” message and table appears, and add the meebome widget there.

And if you have more questions, feel free to email me (davidleeking at gmail dot com) – and I’ll put you in touch with our Web Administrator.

What did we do? We added a Meebo widget to unsuccessful keyword searches in our library catalog. This way, when a customer searches our catalog and doesn’t find anything, they can contact us via IM and ask for help (we also display our phone number if they want to call).

SO – should be interesting to see what we get from this (since we just turned it on maybe 15 minutes ago). If nothing else, it’s a solid attempt at “humanizing” the OPAC!

We’re using the Wimzi widget, but I’ve also put it on our community info site: http://community.ahml.info. In future weeks it will proliferate its way into more pages on that site, but I wanted to put it on the homepage in a hurry. Note that I’m also using it to promote other avenues, as well, especially 24/7. A nice thing about Wimzi is that you can have different versions of the widget for different locations and that the transcript indicates which widget was being used, so we can compare traffic from different points. Meebo may do this, too. I don’t know.

http://www.ahml.info Bill Pardue

We’re using the Wimzi widget, but I’ve also put it on our community info site: http://community.ahml.info. In future weeks it will proliferate its way into more pages on that site, but I wanted to put it on the homepage in a hurry. Note that I’m also using it to promote other avenues, as well, especially 24/7. A nice thing about Wimzi is that you can have different versions of the widget for different locations and that the transcript indicates which widget was being used, so we can compare traffic from different points. Meebo may do this, too. I don’t know.

http://www.ahml.info/ Bill Pardue

Sorry, the above URL doesn’t work right (I think the ending period botches things). Try:

Hey all, I got the meebo widget to work in HIP 4.x — if anyone wants details just let me know. I also added it on the ‘no hits’ page here http://www.uab.edu/lister/tools/ — so far it has been well received.

Lisa

http://www.lhl.uab.edu/systems Lisa

Hey all, I got the meebo widget to work in HIP 4.x — if anyone wants details just let me know. I also added it on the ‘no hits’ page here http://www.uab.edu/lister/tools/ — so far it has been well received.

Great idea, David. A year or two ago we added the Google spell check API service to our no results screen. It catches typos and misspellings and displays a clickable link, just like in Google. If you are comfortable editing the XSL stylesheets (and you obviously are) it’s pretty trivial to add.

http://www.hclib.org Glenn Peterson

Great idea, David. A year or two ago we added the Google spell check API service to our no results screen. It catches typos and misspellings and displays a clickable link, just like in Google. If you are comfortable editing the XSL stylesheets (and you obviously are) it’s pretty trivial to add.